Something scarier than recession to think about - >> Operation Plutonium Completed
By Christopher Pala
Special to The Moscow Times
ALMATY, Kazakhstan — U.S. officials are expressing quiet satisfaction after an
enormous stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium, located in a sensitive zone in
Kazakhstan, was made theft-proof in what the Energy Department calls "one of the
world's largest and most successful nonproliferation projects."
More than 3 tons of plutonium, enough to make 400 bombs, had been stored in a
fast-breeder reactor on the Caspian Sea shore under security that one early visitor
likened to that of an office building.
Today, the plutonium has been fully secured, said Trisha Dedik, director of the U.S.
Energy Department's office of nonproliferation policy, in an interview. "It's been a
great success."
On Thursday, Dedik and others took part in a ceremony in the city of Aktau with
Kazakh officials celebrating the end of the project.
The plutonium was produced by a BN-350 fast-breeder nuclear reactor located on the
arid northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, a few kilometers from Aktau. Both the city
and 350-megawatt power plant, the first-ever commercial breeder reactor, owed their
location to considerable uranium deposits that were mined nearby.
The plutonium was designed to be shipped to other parts of the Soviet Union for use
as fuel in other reactors like it, but only one, the BN600, was ever built. Located near
the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, it ultimately took little or no plutonium from the
BN-350, so the material just piled up.
The plant closed in 1999, at the end of its useful life. After 26 years of providing
electricity and water by powering a desalinization plant to the Aktau region, there was
an accumulation of 3,000 five-meter cylinders called fuel assembles containing spent
nuclear fuel, from which a total of 3,250 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium could
be extracted with relative ease, according to the Energy Department. Nearly half the
assemblies emitted little radiation and could be safely handled by men wearing light
protection. The other half were too "hot" to be handled by anything but robots. All
spent years in a football field-sized cooling pond in the plant.
"When I walked in there the first time, back in 1995, it had all the security of a modern
office building," recalled Fredrick Crane, an American physicist familiar with the plant.
"It was a clean and well-run reactor, there were some guards but otherwise all you
needed was one code, like in an airport terminal, and you were in."
With each fuel assembly weighing 135 kilograms, a couple of strong men with
accomplices inside could spirit out the half-dozen cylinders required to make a bomb.
"It was attractive material and it was accessible," said Dedik of the Energy Department.
Just 800 kilometers to the south along the Caspian coastline lies Iran and what U.S.
officials say is a covert nuclear-weapons program. About 1,300 kilometers to the
southeast is Afghanistan, home to accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, and due west,
straight across the Caspian, Chechnya smolders.
"There are fast-breeder reactors in Western Europe and Japan, but the plutonium
produced there doesn't accumulate like it did in Aktau, it's reprocessed pretty quickly,"
Dedik said. "There just aren't any big stockpiles. Remember, most weapons-grade
plutonium is produced by dedicated reactors, controlled by the military, and they're
usually much better guarded than this one was."
So in 1996, the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the International
Atomic Energy Agency and the United States quietly set up a program to immediately
increase security and, starting 1998, to package the fuel assemblies to make them
impossible to be stolen. Dedik and Crane were among several dozen Americans who
worked on the project, which was funded by the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction
Program under the Nunn-Lugar Act.
A torpedo factory in Almaty that had converted to civilian work was assigned to
manufacture big steel canisters in which four or six of the plutonium-rich assemblies —
some "hot," some "cooled" — were packed together and sealed before being returned
to the cooling pond. Weighing well over a ton, the filled canisters are far too heavy to
be handled by anything but a large robot, and all of them now emit lethal doses of
radiation. Last month, after nearly three years and $43 million in U.S. aid money, the
478th and last canister was welded shut and lowered into the cooling pond. At the
plant, Crane said, there are now manned gates, closed-circuit televisions, x-ray
machines and turnstiles with magnetic cards, along with sensors that monitor the
materials around the clock.
The packing is designed to last 50 years, but the plutonium isn't destined to stay at the
closed Aktau plant that long. Eventually, under a decree signed six months ago by
Nazarbayev, the canisters will be taken 4,400 kilometers by train to the former nuclear
testing grounds at Semipalatinsk, on the other side of this nation the size of Western
Europe. There, silos will be dug into the vast steppe and the fat cylinders will be
buried, using a technique perfected in the United States.
"It will be the longest rail shipment of plutonium ever attempted," said Dedik. "They
will have to design special transportation casks." And since the rail line wanders
through what is now Russia and Kyrgyzstan, special loops will have to be built so that
the plutonium stays in Kazakhstan during its whole voyage.<<
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